Student charges that textbook downplays climate change

“[S]cience doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all,” says a random climate skeptic the widely used 2005 version of Advanced Placement high school textbook American Government. The text, written by two prominent conservatives, goes on to imply that the cause of climate change is in doubt and that the negative effects of global warming will be balanced by positives. “I just realized from my own knowledge that some of this stuff in the book is just plain wrong,” says New Jersey high-school senior Matthew LaClair. He brought his concerns to pro-science think tank Center for Inquiry, which wrote a report [PDF] detailing the book’s biases. Publisher Houghton Mifflin says it will review the text and points out that it has, um, improved things in the latest version, in which the above sentence was changed to, “Science doesn’t know how bad the greenhouse effect is.”